Long Island School District Bans Balls To Avoid Playground Injuries

Rick Chandler

3:44 pm, October 9th, 2013

Good news, Long Island: no longer will your children be menaced by basketballs and kickballs at recess.The Port Washington School District has banned all balls on the playground, except for Nerf balls, to avoid schoolyard injuries.

Now illegal are: footballs, baseballs, soccer balls, lacrosse balls or “any other equipment that might harm a child or school friends.” Also banned: games of tag, and cartwheels, unless supervised by a teacher.

“Some of these injuries can unintentionally become very serious so we want to make sure our children have fun, but are also protected,” Dr. Kathleen Maloney, superintendent of Port Washington Schools, told CBS New York.

This has already become in an issue in Canada, of course. Some school districts there have also banned balls on the playground, owing to all the scrapes and ow-ies that occur during those rugged games of dodgeball and such. But one school fought back, staging an “Occupy Recess” demonstration.

At one Ontario elementary school, Lockview in St. Catherines, kids gathered 95 signatures after their principal imposed a similar ball ban in 2011. They then presented the petition to the principal … who lifted the ban.

But don’t expect anything crazy like democracy to work here in the U.S.

We shouldn’t dwell on the negative, however. Look at it this way: there are still plenty of schoolyard activities in Long Island that haven’t been banned: